A small firm, on purpose.
Vale Heart Co is a digital consultancy. We are deliberately small: the people you meet in the first conversation are the people who do the work, and there is no layer between them and you.
What we are
Most consultancies are organised around a specialism and sell that specialism to everyone who calls. We are organised the other way round — around the kind of problem that does not sit cleanly inside one discipline, and that therefore tends to survive being handed to three separate vendors.
In practice that means we spend our time on estates rather than on single artefacts: a set of properties, the campaigns pointed at them, the data coming back, and the infrastructure underneath. Work that crosses those boundaries is the work we are best at, because crossing them is where the answer usually is.
We are not the right firm for everything. We do not do brand identity from scratch, media buying, or large enterprise programme management. When a request needs one of those, we say so early rather than stretching to cover it.
What we believe
Evidence outranks opinion, including ours
We would rather be shown wrong by the data in week one than be right-sounding for a quarter. If the survey contradicts what we assumed going in, the plan changes.
Boring infrastructure is a feature
The interesting parts of a system should be the parts customers touch. Hosting, deployment, tracking and sending should be so dull that nobody thinks about them. A great deal of our work is making things less interesting.
Write it down
An undocumented system is one resignation away from being a legacy system. Every engagement produces written reasoning, not just working code — including the options we rejected and why.
Say the unwelcome thing early
Bad news does not improve with age. If a date is not going to be met, if a budget is being spent on the wrong thing, or if the project should stop, you will hear it from us at the point we know it.
How we are set up
No account managers between you and the people building it.
Engagements are run by a single lead who stays with the work from the first call through handover. Specialists join for the parts that need them and leave when those parts are done. Nobody is introduced in a pitch and then replaced on delivery.
We work remotely and asynchronously by default, with scheduled calls at points that warrant them. Clients get a shared channel for day-to-day questions rather than a ticket queue.
- One named lead per engagement, from first call to handover
- Weekly written progress, and a live environment you can look at yourself
- A shared channel for questions between the scheduled calls
- Access scoped to what the work needs, and revoked at handover
Next step
Talk to the people who do the work.
There is no sales team to get past. The first conversation is with whoever would lead the engagement.